Third time sorry

The Malta Independent on Sunday Third time sorry

What could be worse than an administration in its third term except one in its fourth` Only an administration who before its third term had a short break in opposition of 22 months and thinks that that is enough to start all over again.

This third term administration is easily comparable to` Labour`s third term between 1982-1987.` It is even worse. Because even Mintoff at his worst in 1982 and 1983, acting like a rebel in search for a cause after he had achieved all his political objectives in 1979, he was not half as arrogant as the current version of` Fenech Adami.

With the nationalist elected representatives failing to take their place in parliament following the December 1981 elections thus` giving Mintoff the full right to nominate acolytes to fill the opposition seats ` a facility which would have produced the automatic right` to change the constitution as he pleased ` Mintoff stopped short of grabbing total and unmitigated power.

Not only that but to his credit Mintoff engineered the return to parliament of the nationalist opposition with full re-instatement to their seats to which they had lost all constitutional rights.` And following terse negotiations Mintoff was instrumental, with others on the Labour side, to change` the constitution to ensure that the perverse result of 1981 would not be repeated.` Not even the mother of democracies, the United States, are taking steps to amend their constitution in this sense following the perverse result of last November`s elections where President Bush got less popular nation-wide votes than the defeated challenger.

The words of Fenech Adami in 1986 still ring loud in my ears. He then expected that not only the Opposition had a right to nominate its representatives on the electoral commission but even that the government`s own appointees had to be acceptable to the opposition.

Now Fenech Adami is at the other end of the stick. Instead of facing an incumbent government fatigued by its overstay in power beyond the second term, now he is totally wrapped up in contradictions accumulated over 14 years of continuous power. The tune has changed. Now he thinks he has the right to nominate the whole electoral commission against the wishes of the Opposition.` He thinks that resignation of Opposition nominated members of the electoral commission because they cannot fulfil their proper duties is something to be taken lightly and that anybody acceptable to the Prime Minister can fill their place without treatment of the root cause of the problem.

Harold Wilson once said that a week is too long a time in politics,` and he was right. Ten years is probably as much as any human can take without being infected by the power bug which our twin party system of winner takes` all,` produces in excessive doses. Roosevelt had the wisdom of shaping the American constitution not to permit` a third presidential term.` If this is necessary under the American system of substantial checks and balances just imagine how damaging to the soul of this nation is a third term devoid of any real checks and balances.

We are living` a virtual democracy. Anybody who argues anything out of line with the government`s tune is depicted either as having lost control of his brain or acting against the national interest.

Take the piece in this same space last week penned by the Honourable Minister of Tourism.` He said that I should be shamed for trying to impress the EU that our country does not merit to qualify for the structural funds which seem to be the source of our future salvation from the economic and environmental crisis that this fatigued administration has put us in.

Much as I try to be logical in my reasoning I never claimed that whatever I say or write will influence, even in its minutest form, the level of assistance we can get from the EU. Thanks for the credit Mr Minister,` but it is totally undeserved.` My argument is that I just cannot accept that in reality the economic gap between Cyprus and Malta` is so large that we make it only up to 52% of the EU - 15 GDP average whereas Cyprus has exceeded 82% of the same` EU-15 average. I opined that once our statistical methodology comes into shape this difference will narrow substantially and our claim for high level Objective One funding in an enlarged EU-27 becomes questionable.`

If statistically I am proved wrong than the Minister of Tourism should join his cabinet colleagues to make a public apology to the Maltese people. An apology` that after 14 years of decadent money no problem administration our standard of living has fallen well below those in` Cyprus with whom we used to benchmark remarkably well in the mid-eighties.